She Died a Lady (7 page)

Not without squawks, Sir Henry Merrivale was impelled round the tangled paths to the back garden. The sun was a little warm for his invalid’s shawl, so he stuffed it behind him. Then he and Superintendent Craft and I sat under the apple-tree while Craft produced a notebook.

‘See here,’ H.M. growled, with surprising meekness, ‘I got a confession to make.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘The old man’s bored,’ said H.M. ‘I’ve been sitting on my behind for what seems like years. They don’t want me in London’ – the corners of his mouth drew down – ‘and they don’t seem to want me anywhere, and I’m sort of lost and at a loose end.’

(I wondered why, since somebody had said he occupied a very important position at the War Office.)

‘So if you’ve got anything of a stimulatin’ nature to ask me, I’m all for it. There’s only one question I’d like to ask you at the beginning, son. And be awful careful about the answer.’

‘Yes, sir?’ Craft prompted.

Opening the pocket of his linen suit, to display a considerable corporation ornamented with a large gold watch-chain, H.M. fished out a case full of what proved to be vile black cigars. He lit one of these, and drew in a long sniff as though he found the smoke unpleasant: which, in fact, it definitely was. His small sharp eyes fastened on Craft.

‘Was there any jiggery-pokery about those footprints?’ he asked.

‘I don’t quite follow that. Jiggery-pokery how?’

H.M. regarded him dismally.

‘Oh, my son! I’ve got a nasty suspicious mind.’

‘Well, sir?’

‘You see two lines of footprints, a large set made by a man’s shoes and a small set made by a woman’s shoes, leadin’ out through soft soil to a full stop. No other prints at all. Now, to the mind of radiant innocence that means a man and a woman have gone out to the high-jump. Hey? But to this sink of low tricks here’ – H.M. tapped his forehead – ‘it may mean the whole thing’s a fake.’

Superintendent Craft frowned, spreading out his notebook on his knee.

‘A fake how?’

‘Well, suppose, for some reason or other, these two only want to
seem
dead. All right. The woman stands on the steps outside the back door. She walks out, alone, across the soft soil to a little patch of scrub grass on the edge of the cliff. In her hand she’s holdin’ a pair of the man’s shoes. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘There she takes off her own shoes, and puts on the man’s shoes. In these she just walks backwards, beside the first line of tracks, until she reaches the steps again.’ H. M. made a mesmeric pass with his cigar. ‘And there, d’ye see, you’ve got two sets of footprints to fulfil the conditions. It’s an awful simple dodge, son.’

He broke off, beginning to simmer and glare, because Superintendent Craft was laughing.

It was a soft sound, deep and hardly audible, a laughter of genuine appreciation. It lit up Craft’s gloomy face, in contrast to the fixity of his glass eye, and made his chin fold out over his collar.

‘You see anything so funny about that?’ demanded H.M.

‘No, sir. It’s rather good. And it would be all very well in the story-books. The only thing I can tell you is that it didn’t happen.’

Then Craft grew very serious.

‘You see, sir, it’s like this. I don’t want to talk fancy, but footprints are a very well-studied branch of criminology. Gross has a whole chapter on them. Contrary to what people believe, footprints are harder to fake than almost anything else. In fact, it’s almost impossible to fake them, and certainly impossible in the way you’re talking about. This “walking backwards” business has been tried before. It can always be spotted a mile off.

‘A person walking backwards can’t help leaving traces of it. The steps are shorter; the heel is turned inwards; the weight’s distributed in a totally different way, slanting from toe to heel. Then there’s the question of the two persons’ weight.

‘I’d like you to see some plaster casts of those prints we took on Saturday night. They’re honest prints. No jiggery-pokery about them. The man was five feet eleven inches tall, weighed eleven stone ten, and wore number nine shoe. The woman was five feet six inches tall, weighed nine stone four, and wore number five shoe. If there’s one thing we can be certain about in the business, it’s this:
Mrs Wainright and Mr Sullivan walked out to the edge of that cliff, and they didn’t come back
.’

Craft paused, clearing his throat.

And, as I can see now, what he said was quite true.

‘Oh, ah,’ grunted H.M., eyeing him from behind the oily smoke of the cigar. ‘You take your scientific criminology pretty seriously in these parts, don’t you?’

‘
I
do,’ the superintendent assured him. ‘Though I don’t often get a chance to apply it.’

‘Meanin’ that you think you can apply it here?’

‘Let me tell you what happened, sir.’ Craft glanced round, raked the garden with his sinister eye, and lowered his voice. ‘As I told you, the bodies were washed up at Happy Hollow very early this morning. They’d been dead and in the water since early Saturday night – I needn’t give all the gruesome details – and you’d naturally have thought they died of fractures or drowning. But they hadn’t died of fractures or drowning.’

A very curious look had come into H.M.’s eye.

‘Hadn’t died of … ?’

‘No, sir. Both of them had been shot through the heart at very close range, body-range, with some small-calibre weapon.’

It was so quiet in the garden that we could hear somebody talking over a back fence two houses away.

‘Well?’ growled H.M., though he seemed annoyed by some inner suspicion which made him puff very violently at the cigar. ‘If you’re goin’ to be so ruddy scientific and technical,
I
can tell you there’s nothing very unusual or surprisin’ in that. Plenty of suicides, especially suicide-pacts, do just that. They make double-sure of flyin’ to glory. They stand on the edge of a river; the man shoots the girl; over she goes; he shoots himself, and over
he
goes. Finish.’

Craft nodded solemnly.

‘That’s true,’ he agreed. ‘What’s more, the wounds were characteristic suicide-wounds. Naturally, I couldn’t verify anything until we had a post-mortem report. But the coroner phoned Dr Hankins, and Dr Hankins did a post-mortem for us this morning.

‘Each victim had been killed by a .32 bullet. Fired, as I told you, at body-range. The clothes were powder-burned. There was burning, blackening, and tattooing of the wounds. That’s to say’ – Craft held up a well-sharpened pencil and sighted along it – ‘unconsumed bits of the propellant were embedded in the skin. Showing for certain sure the shots were fired at body-range. Double suicide.’

‘Well, then,’ said H.M., ‘what’s bitin’ you? Why have you got such a funny look on that dial of yours? There’s your evidence.’

Again Craft nodded solemnly.

‘Yes, sir, there’s my evidence.’ He paused. ‘Only, you see, it wasn’t a double suicide. It was a double murder.’

Now, you who read this record have been expecting it. You have been waiting for that word ‘murder’, and perhaps wondering when it would first occur. To you it is only the preparation for a battle of wits. But to me – having the thing flung in my face like this – every word Craft said came with a cold shock better left to your imagination.

The talk of shot-wounds,
‘unconsumed bits of the propellant were embedded in the skin’
, was bad enough when this applied to Rita Wainright. As we sat in the garden under the apple-tree, Rita had become no more than a heap of flesh on a morgue-slab. But any talk of murder, of someone feeling a hate violent enough to kill both Rita and Barry Sullivan, was completely incredible.

H.M., his mouth open, regarded Craft with something like awe. But he did not comment.

‘Now, let’s take the weapon,’ pursued the superintendent. ‘To be exact, a .32 Browning automatic. If Mr Sullivan shot the lady, and then shot himself – or the other way round, if you prefer – then you’d expect the gun to fall into the sea along with ’em. Wouldn’t you?’

H.M. eyed him. ‘I don’t expect anything, son. You’re tellin’ the story. You go ahead.’

‘Or else,’ argued Craft, ‘you’d expect to find it on the cliff somewhere near the place where they went over. But you wouldn’t –’ here he lifted the pencil and raised his shaggy eyebrows for emphasis – ‘you wouldn’t expect to find it lying in the main road a very long distance from the sea, and fully half a mile away from the Wainrights’ house?’

‘So?’ said H.M.

‘I’d better explain that. Is anybody here acquainted with Mr Stephen Grange? He’s a solicitor at Barnstaple, but he lives here at Lyncombe.’

‘Very much so,’ I answered, as H.M. shook his head. ‘That was his daughter out there in the street with us a while ago.’

Craft digested this.

‘On Saturday night,’ he went on, ‘or, rather, about one-thirty o’clock on Sunday morning, Mr Grange was driving back home in his car from a visit to Minehead. He passed the Wainrights’ bungalow. We – I mean the police – were there at the time, but naturally Mr Grange didn’t know there was anything wrong.

‘He was driving very slowly and carefully, as all people ought to do nowadays. About half a mile further on in the direction of Lyncombe, his lights picked up something bright and shiny lying at the side of the road. Mr Grange is a careful and methodical sort of gentleman, so he got out to investigate.’

(Just like Steve Grange.)

‘It was a .32 Browning automatic, bright polished steel except for the hard-rubber grip. Mind you, Mr Grange hadn’t any reason to think anything was wrong. It was just a gun. But, as I say, he’s a careful and methodical sort of fellow who’s been no end of help to us. He picked it up in his finger-tips’ – Craft illustrated – ‘and he could tell by smelling the barrel that it had been fired some hours before.

‘He took it home with him that night. Next day he turned it in at the police-station at Lynton. It was sent on to me at Barnstaple. In fact, it arrived early this morning: just after I’d got the news about two drowned bodies that weren’t drowned, but had bullet-holes in ’em. Two bullets had been fired from this gun; and it’d been wiped clean of fingerprints. I turned everything over to Major Selden, the ballistics man. I’ve just come from him. The bullet that killed Mrs Wainright and the bullet that killed Mr Sullivan were both fired from that Browning automatic.’

Superintendent Craft paused.

H.M. opened one eye.

‘Uh-huh,’ he murmured drowsily. ‘D’ye know, son, I’ve been rather expecting that, somehow.’

‘But that’s not all the major was able to say. If we hadn’t found the automatic, we’d have thought for certain it was suicide. Perfect crime, as you might call it. But this particular gun has got a distinct “back-fire”, as some of them have. That’s to say, in non-technical language, you can’t possibly fire it without a back-fire of unburnt powder-grains that get embedded in your hand –’

H.M. was no longer drowsy. He had sat up straight.

‘– like a trade-mark. Neither Mrs Wainright’s hand nor Mr Sullivan’s hand had the marks. So it wasn’t suicide, sir. It was murder.’

‘There’s no doubt about that, son?’

‘You just talk to Major Selden. He’ll convince you.’

‘Oh, my eye!’ muttered H.M. ‘Oh, lord love a duck!’

Craft turned round to me. He was apologetic but determined. His good eye smiled while the other remained lifeless.

‘Now, Doctor, we’ve already had
your
testimony.’

‘You have. But this is the most fantastic –’

‘Yes,’ admitted Craft; ‘that’s just the trouble. Now let’s see.’

He leafed back through his notebook.

‘At nine o’clock on Saturday night, fixed by the news on the radio, Mrs Wainright ran out of the house. Mr Sullivan followed her. Mrs Wainright, or somebody, left a note on the kitchen table saying she was going to do herself in. Am I correct there?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

Craft, I knew, was speaking to H.M. rather than to me.

‘Two sets of footprints, one of Mrs Wainright’s and one of Mr Sullivan’s, lead out to the edge of the cliff. There’s absolutely no fake or trickery – we establish this – about those prints.

‘But,’
said Craft, ‘between nine o’clock and nine-thirty, somebody shot both the victims. The shooting was done at body-range. The murderer must have been standing in front of them, close enough to touch them. And yet there are no footprints anywhere else, except Dr Croxley’s.

‘At half-past nine Dr Croxley got alarmed and went out to see what had happened to them. He saw the tracks leading to the cliff-edge. He went out there, looked over, and came back to the bungalow.’ Here Craft grew heavily whimsical. ‘I don’t suppose you shot those two yourself, did you, Doctor?’

‘Great Scott, no!’

Craft smiled in that un-funny way of his.

‘Don’t worry,’ he advised. ‘I’ve been a good many years in this district. I can’t think of anybody less likely to do murder than Luke Croxley.’

‘Thanks.’

‘But there’s good evidence to show you didn’t do it,’ Craft went on, ‘even if we were mugs enough to suspect you.’ He turned to H.M. ‘Dr Croxley hasn’t been a police-surgeon for nothing. He remembered to keep away from those footprints and not mess them up.’

‘I was just wonderin’ about that, son.’

‘In fact, he stayed a good six feet away all the distance out. Those tracks run, all of them, in straight parallel lines. He couldn’t very well have stood six feet away from the nearest victim, facing the same direction and never even turning sideways, while he shot ’em both at body-range. No: his testimony’s all right. We’ll accept it.’

This time I put even more acid into my thanks.

Craft ignored it. ‘But you see where that puts us, Sir Henry. I won’t ask you to come and look at the bodies, because they were pretty badly smashed up by the fall and by knocking along the coast all this time …’

‘They weren’t,’ I said, ‘unrecognizable?’

Craft grinned: a sickly sort of grin, as even he seemed to realize.

‘Oh, no. No funny business about
that
. They’re the bodies of Mrs Wainright and Mr Sullivan, all right. All the same you ought to be glad you didn’t have to do the post-mortem.’